VISITING AUNT JANE

In late November, 2019, a few months before the Scamdemic nightmare began, and on my unaccompanied drive back from visiting other family members in Western Pennsylvania, I visited my then 93-year-old Aunt Jane. Jane lives in Shamokin, a geographically isolated, Central PA coal town 140 miles from where I grew up, and still live, in the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area.

As Loretta Lynn’s father said in Coal Miner’s Daughter, those who grew up in places like Eastern Kentucky or Shamokin had three options: coal mine, moonshine or move it on down the line. By the 1950s, the coal region’s mines were employing fewer men. Thus, after my father finished his army stint in Louisiana, he and my mother moved from Shamokin to North Jersey so he could find work to support their new family.

We’d return to Pennsylvania two or three times/year: Christmas, Easter and once in the summer. As a kid, Shamokin seemed like another world. The air smelled different than did the air at home. I later learned that the smell was sulfur from the coal that people burned to heat their houses. As the years passed, and more people heated with oil, the air lost that scent. Nonetheless, my grandmother’s house still smelled of something pleasant that my Mom later told me was patchouli, a moth deterrent.

The Shamokin tap water tasted different, too. I liked it better, though I’m not sure I was supposed to.

Unlike the suburban detached New Jersey ranch house in which we lived, Shamokin dwellings were hillside row houses with either no, or tiny, yards. My parents had grown up there in such homes a few blocks from each other. All of my relatives were also from that “City,” which had a small, flat downtown with a bunch of stores, inexpensive eateries and a few churches. When you walked down the hills to buy stuff, strangers would greet you. That didn’t happen in New Jersey.

Shamokin’s downtown was surrounded on all sides by hills above dozens of mines, large and small. Christmases there and then were cold and snowy, and people hung colored lights on the porches of their modest homes. Someone always placed a large, white-lighted star on the highest hill—a massive bank of waste coal—in town. At night, the star shone in the blackness above the city.

—

When we visited Shamokin as kids, we still had many living relatives there. We could run between my two grandmas’ and two aunts’ hillside rowhouses, two and three blocks away, respectively. Other aunts, uncles and cousins lived in other parts of town.

My Uncle Dick, who was my Mom’s brother, and his wife, my Aunt Jane, also lived in a rowhouse on a steep hillside. I’ve known Dick and Jane (their real names) for as long as I can remember. When we visited them as kids, Jane used to serve me and my siblings ice cream and homemade cake as we sat around the table in her light green plastic-walled kitchen. She spoke warmly and wisecracked with us in her regional twang. Some people say Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. There are differences but, having spent chunks of time in both states, this characterization is truer than it’s false. Though the people who note the resemblance intend to disparage both places, I consider it a compliment.

Jane often asked us questions and treated us as more grown up than did most adults. I wished I could have lived down the block from her so I could pop in and visit, and not just for the cake and ice cream. Jane made me feel special in a way that my friends’ parents didn’t. Even now, if you call Jane and she’s not home, her answering machine tells you to leave a message and ends by saying “Jesus loves you, and so do I.”

For decades, I went back to visit Dick and Jane a time or two per year, later bringing my wife and kids along. Although, as an adult, I avoided cake, I made an exception when I visited Jane. She was too nice to turn down and eating at that table with her presiding was too comfortable, fun and familiar. Besides, when I reached the age where I began eating more sensibly, Jane would make fun of me if I didn’t say “Yes.”

Uncle Dick passed away sixteen years ago. A World War II veteran, he had MS for forty years and spent the last fifteen bedbound. His fortitude during that ordeal was awesome. Whenever I’d go to visit him, he’d say, in heavily slurred speech, that he was doing “wonderful” and proceed to be a great host who never felt sorry for himself.

Jane and his daughter, my cousin, Sharon, cared for Dick the whole time he was disabled, except when my parents would arrive from New Jersey to take Jane’s and Sharon’s places so they could take an annual, week or two-long Jersey Shore vacation.

—

On that that late, chilly 2019 Saturday afternoon, Jane welcomed me into her third-floor apartment in the eleven-story senior housing tower. We sat at the small table in the downtown-facing-windowed corner of the kitchenette. The sun soon set as we talked about how we were each doing, memories of time shared, the people we both knew, the things that had gone on—and were going on—in their lives and what these occurrences said about life, generally. There aren’t many people who know you since before you could walk and whom you know from ever since you could remember.

As the night fell, we drank multiple rounds of hot tea and ate several slices of Jane’s homemade—and very tasty, just the right sweetness—pumpkin/cream cheese roll. In the darkness, we could see through the window a multi-colored string of Christmas lights on the front porch of a house on street level. We shared the conversation evenly and didn’t run out of things to talk about. All of what she said interested me.

Jane grew up with four siblings in a “shack-like” house with newspaper fastened on the inside of the exterior walls to block drafts and bugs. Because her father was an alcoholic who couldn’t keep a job, Jane had to drop out of school after the sixth grade to raise her four siblings. Jane never mentioned any of this; I learned it from my parents, who grew up in Jane’s neighborhood.

Despite all of that, being 93, and all of the sulfur dioxide she’s breathed, all of the cake she’s eaten and a grade school education—Jane had plenty of memory, wisdom and warmth left. I thoroughly enjoyed the time shared.

As I’d started my day at 7 AM, by 9 PM, I had to resume my trip home. Jane walked with me to the elevator, we hugged, smiled and said goodbye to each other a final time as the elevator doors shut.

I drove the three hours home in the dark. You can’t speed on dark roads that intermittently run through mining towns. Nor did I want to, with all of those Christmas lights to behold on all those rowhouses. When I see lights on inside houses at night at any time of year, I wonder, like Lucinda Williams, what the people who live there’s lives are like and if they’re happy and content.

—

When I spoke to my parents on the phone a few days after my trip, I told them I’d visited Jane and that we’d talked for over three hours. My Mom expressed surprise that we could do that, given the different settings in which Jane and I grew up and lived and the different life stages we were in. But rapport is rapport. And family is family.

A few days later, I received in the mail a neatly handwritten, in cursive, note from Jane. In five or six sentences of perfect grammar, she wrote how much she enjoyed my visit. I’ll keep that note for as long as I keep anything.

—

This past July, 2023, I went back, again alone, to Shamokin for a memorial service for my Aunt Barb, on my father’s side of the family.

Before the trip, I called Jane’s daughter, Sharon, to see if she or Jane would be around so I could visit them. Sharon, who had terminal cancer—she died a week later—got back to me and said she, Sharon, was not feeling well enough for visitors and that Jane wasn’t taking visitors “because of Covid.”

It wasn’t clear to me whose decision that was.

For over a year, Jane’s federally-funded housing tower had forbidden visitors and, later, I suppose, barred uninjected visitors like me. But who would have been harmed by my unsick presence? And who needed to know? I hadn’t seen any security guard there on prior visits.

In addition to all those who spent a year or two hiding from the world, I know a few other “at-risk” people who have spent the past four years doing so. One can say it was important for at-risk individuals to protect themselves. But I wonder if, at 97—or at any age—a life lived in isolation or in fear of germs is worth living. It’s terrible that so many seniors were either made to live, or scared into living, their final months or years alone. Day after day, week after week.

And made to die alone.

I haven’t seen Jane in four years. I may never see her again. It hurts to think of how she and so many others who lived in fear, or were told to, during this time. If, ultimately, we’re here to love one another, the costs of isolation should have factored heavily into Covid policy. Human-to-human hours was a more important metric than were, e.g., case counts, especially because the latter stat derived from dubious tests.

I didn’t isolate myself, nor would I ever, at any age. No matter how long one’s life lasts, it’s too short for that.